You Can Tithe and Go Broke

So as I said, I really do believe that these principles that I heard from Edwene Gaines that day would really work. I set out to change my life especially surrounding career and finance. But I looking back to that time, I can see how what I did wrong, I did very wrong and (this is straight-up my own opinion) leaving out even one of the crucial steps to the plan she shared with us that day can queer up the whole system.

I have always been a generous soul and I really hope that doesn’t change. For all the ways I’ve fucked up in life, when I look at people who are considered “successful” by the world’s standards and know they got there by tricking other people out of their money– I don’t really want to be like that. I’d rather die poor if that was the only way to get money. So to the part about tithing, oddly enough I didn’t have that much resistance at all . I readily gave the “first and best” 10% to “wherever I got my spiritual food.” I even had a little separate envelope so that at the end of my shift waiting tables, I would set aside 10% and be on the lookout for where I was receiving spiritual food. Often it was from support group meetings with other recovering alcoholic addicts but sometime, just as Edwene had said that she did, I tithed to individuals, book authors, arts organizations. If I felt like my soul was getting fed, off went that tithe to that source. Tithing, I would guess, would be the one part of the four step process that most people would have an immediate aversion to. I once made some allusion to tithing in a blog post (or Facebook post, I can’t really remember) which drew a pretty vitriolic response from some dude. And I should say right now, I am not trying to sell y’all on any of this. I’m just telling my story.

So I got busy faithfully tithing and not-as-faithfully doing the other steps Edwene listed. I am here to tell you it is possible to go broke while tithing and not taking the other steps. If only giving 10% to the source of spiritual food was all that was required for to march into financial abundance, humankind would have figured that out long ago and we’d all be rich. That’s just not the way it works. I’m sorry that some people are lead (often by charlatans) to believe that tithing is a “magic wand” of some sort that rigs the great slot machine in the sky to pay out heavy gold. And again, with that said, my opinion is that it is not optional. I will say that I have never been without food and shelter while I was in tithing integrity even when I was tithing through a lot of fear.

One of the main things that she talked about but I can see now that I didn’t fully comprehend was the concept of “abundance consciousness” as opposed to “poverty consciousness.” I’ll come back to this later on because the way I think about myself, about my relationship to money, and what I’m “due” has had a huge impact on my finances in the years since I first heard Edwene Gaines introduce these ideas to me for the first time at Unity of Birmingham.

But I’m going to have to cut y’all loose early tonight because I’ve been in this bed for twenty hours now with what I can only guess is Ebola. If I live, I’ll…